Video cameras (or camcorders) are devices that are popular with amateur videographers. Video cameras may be a digital camera, which stores digital video on a memory device, or an analog video camera, which stores video footage on magnetic videotape. Video footage captured by an analog video camera may be converted into a digitized format using well-known techniques. Digital video may be processed using a software running on a computing devices (such as personal computers) to edit and manipulate the data captured by video cameras.
The traditional home digital video paradigm expects a user to shoot good video, perform tedious video editing, and then output a single large video containing the edited movie. This paradigm, however, suffers from several problems. One problem is that good video that is enjoyable to watch is difficult to photograph or shoot. Home digital video is overwhelmingly shot by amateur videographers. These amateurs generally have little training in shooting video and consequently frequently make poor decisions about what and how to shoot video. The result is video footage that is difficult to watch.
Another problem is that raw video footage, even when professionally photographed, is difficult and tedious to edit. Professional editors with professional training and using high-end editing tools can take hour to edit raw video into a final version that is just minutes in duration. Moreover, most raw video footage is boring and poring over hours of raw video is quite a tedious task, especially for an amateur.
Yet another problem is that current video editing software for amateur use is modeled after professional editing systems. This tends to make the software difficult for the average consumer to use. User interfaces of current video editing software typically provide a user with one view of the raw video footage. These user interface provide a user with a timeline along side the footage to give the user temporal orientation. The timeline may include several different “tracks”, such as a video 1 track, a video 2 track, an audio 1 track, and so forth. The user interface includes controls similar to a VCR, such as play, fast-forward and rewind buttons. Using these buttons, a user browses the video footage by moving back and forth across the footage using the controls. This process of browsing the video footage to find a particular section is called “scrubbing”.
Having only one view of raw video footage can make it difficult to determine the contents contained in the footage. One view at a time of an entire video does not provide enough information to a user to determine what is contained on the video and whether the content is interesting. Most videos are at least two hours long and contain a multitude of events. Scrubbing through the raw footage using software giving only a single view of the footage can be quite tedious.
Once a user finds interesting video footage, beginning and ending cuts are placed on the timeline. Between these two cuts is the video footage that the user wants to keep. This process of placing cuts on the video footage may be repeated for other portions of the video footage. This editing process of scrubbing the video to determine the location of cuts in the video footage is a tedious, repetitive and time-consuming task and must be performed manually. Thus, for the average consumer the editing process of videos is a difficult and burdensome task.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a user interface that displays a plurality of views of a video, provides a multitude of information about the video, and presents the plurality of views and corresponding information to a user in an informative, compact and easy to user manner.